“CAN YOU GIVE US A CAUSE OF DEATH, DOCTOR?”
It seemed so obvious. There was no bloody ripped-out throat as in Farmer Morgan’s death last month, and Reg Brown was a habitual drunk; but given what had been going on in Brytewood the past few weeks, one couldn’t help wondering. Alice bent over the body and looked at his staring eyes, his pale skin, and his shrunken, narrow wrists. There hadn’t been a frost last night, but it had rained, and his clothes were still damp. He’d no doubt have caught pneumonia if he’d lived. He was thin. Wasted from alcohol. Pity they didn’t ration that!
She was about to stand and tell Sergeant Jones to go ahead and call for an ambulance to collect the body when she noticed a bruise on Reg’s neck: A faint mark, like a large insect bite.
BLOODY AWFUL
GEORGIA EVANS
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter One
Gloria Prewitt, district nurse and werefox, all but wobbled off her bicycle seeing the doctor’s car parked in front of Mother Longhurst’s cottage. Given the longstanding coolness between Alice Doyle and old Mother Longhurst, the reputed village witch, Gloria was agog with curiosity and tempted to park her bicycle and toddle up to the front door on some pretext. The war gave so many excuses: checking on blackout, it was so easy, after all, to a miss a chink where light could escape, reminding about first aid training or evenings knitting comforts for the troops.
But Gloria was running late already, and she’d see Alice later. Right now she had to get up to Cherry Hill Farm. Old Mrs. Longhurst had scalded her arm with boiling jam a week earlier and the dressing needed changing.
Gloria saw nothing odd about the common surname. Brytewood was full of Longhursts and plenty of other old, established families. Old and odd, Gloria often thought. Not that she could talk. The good residents of Brytewood would crack their false teeth if they ever discovered the district nurse went furry at intervals and roamed the woods and downs as a bushy-tailed fox.
One person suspected she was more than she appeared and Gloria was making darn sure he never, ever, got a glimmer of her other nature.
As she rode across the village green and up toward Cherry Hill Farm, Gloria wondered what on earth Alice was doing. Had old Mother Longhurst really called her in professionally?
“It worked, I see.”
Alice stared. Mother Longhurst was a witch but, “How did you know that?” Did the knife of petrified wood give off a magical aura?
“You’re alive, aren’t you? If it hadn’t worked, you’d be dead.”
So much for a magical aura. Alice wasn’t that sure she believed in them anyway, whatever her grandmother claimed. “Yes, it worked.” Killing a vampire wasn’t normally part of a county doctor’s day, but needs must as the saying went. It was 1940 after all and with Britain under daily threat of invasion, everyone had to do their part.
That her part entailed disposing of an antisocially and destructively bent vampire spy was just her unfortunate luck.
“What happened?” Mother Longhurst asked, taking the knife from Alice and wrapping it in a tattered cloth. “When you got him, I mean?”
Just what Alice did not want to relive but she was alive because of the witch’s help. “The vampire disintegrated.” After bleeding all over her. “Just crumbled into a pile of dust and muck.” It took ages to clean the mess off the gravel drive.
“Always wondered what would happen, or even if it would.”
“You weren’t sure?” Dear heaven! She’d put her faith in an apparently untested magical implement. Oh, well. It had worked and that was what really mattered.
“Dear me, no! I’ve never had cause to use it, nor did my mother. Although my old grandmother used to talk about a vampire in these parts, back in the time of the fourth George. She was the one who passed the knife on to me. Glad to know she was right and it did what it was made for.”
So was Alice.
Very.
“Did your grandmother make it?” She couldn’t tamp down her curiosity. Much as the knife revolted her, not the least for the way it seemed to absorb the vampire’s blood, she couldn’t help her rather morbid fascination.
Mother Longhurst had a really nasty cackle. Showed her missing teeth too. “Her? Never! Alice, you might be a doctor with letters after your name and all, but you know nothing about these things.” That, Alice was more than ready to concede. “This knife,” Mother Longhurst indicated the bundle on the table, “was made long before my grandmother was born, long before any of the trees in Surrey were acorns or conkers. Long before recorded history. They say it came down from the Druids.”
A few days earlier, Alice would have politely scoffed at that anointment. Now, she just nodded. “That accounts for the strange runes and hieroglyphics on the handle?”
“Maybe.” The old woman seemed to clam up, pulling the bundle toward her. “But it’s served its purpose.”
“I might need it again. I think there’s another vampire in the area.” Think? She was pretty darn certain. She’d taken him into her surgery and called an ambulance for him. Before he disappeared.
Mother Longhurst shook her head. “You’ll have to find another way. This knife is spent. Will be decades, maybe a century or more, before it has power again.”
Smashing! “It won’t work again?”
“Not